During that time, he developed his Thoughts on the Social Science of the Future, first in Russian as Мысли о социальной науке будущего (Mysli o sotsial'noi naukie budushchego; 1872), and then in German as Gedanken über die Socialwissenschaft der Zukunft (1873–1881).
Lilienfeld, in fact, was governor of the Courland Governorate from 1868 till 1885, and in the same year in which he put out Social Physiology (1879), his brother, Baron Otto Friedrich von Lilienfeld, on either the 16 or 22 May, founded a seaside town along the banks of the Saka River on Courland’s far western Baltic coast, naming it Pāvilosta (Paulshafen) after his sociologist sibling.
[3] Lilienfeld, who had studied at the Lycée Alexandre in Saint Petersburg,[4] was awarded many honors in recognition for the services he performed for the empire; it would seem, however, that the aspect of his political career for which he felt most proud was his collaboration in the emancipation of Russia’s serfs (Worms 1903: 265).
An anonymous reviewer in Mind noted that the first three volumes start with the conception of Society as a real organism, and attempt to work out this point of view upon the methods proper to the Natural Sciences.
The treatise commences with a demonstration that Society consists of individuals in the same manner as the physical organism is made up of cells, and that the one is real in the same sense as the other.
With this idea the author seeks to exhibit a thorough-going identity between the laws of Nature as they exist in the case of its highest development, Society, and in its lower stages, including the individual human being....
Lilienfeld's fourth volume dealt with "the establishment and elucidation of the Laws of Development of the Social Organism from the physiological point of view" (Anonymous 1880: 298).
In biology, which is the standpoint of [Lilienfeld] and of all defenders of the social organism theory in whatever form, this word has a very definite meaning — a technical usage — viz., physiological without anatomical similarity.
Reviewing Lilienfeld's version of the social organism theory as well as the concurrent articulation of it by René Worms, Ward wrote: Not only in the present treatise, but throughout his great five-volume work, and, later than either, in a pamphlet recently issued, he denies that society can properly be called a superorganism, as Mr. Spencer proposes, and insists that it is in very truth an organism.
It is true, there are fluids of various kinds flowing through the animal body in various physiological capacities, but the blood is full of corpuscles, i. e., cells, and the lymphatics and secretions are not "structures."
In the capacity of the institute's president, Lilienfeld, then a senator in the Russian parliament, traveled from Saint Petersburg and delivered the opening address on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 21.
[7] Though these debates in Paris were characterized as "more animated" than usual (Small 1898: 412), a reviewer across the Atlantic seemed to take them lightly: It would hardly be possible to arouse American sociologists to very lively controversy over what remains in dispute.
Since these differences relate to details and not to essentials, even the most zealous friends of the organic concept are satisfied that it can now take care of itself.
He has investigated thoroughly and thought deeply; and no one can dip into his chapters without being impressed with the value of his reflections on the economic inequalities, the political corruption, the moral degeneration, the educational imbecilities, the religious indifference of the present day.
To describe fads and crazes, degeneracy, outbreaks of insanity, crime and lubricity, as "anomalies of the social nervous system," is only calculated to hasten the wear and tear of the nervous systems of individuals; and to argue that wealth is a "social intercellular substance," is simply to set up a doctrine of sociological transubstantiation (Giddings 1896: 348).
The economic activity of society, work, customs, habits, laws, political liberty, authority, religion, science, art, in short, all of social life, forms and educates man, gives to his efforts, to his intellectual, moral and aesthetic needs, this or that direction, pushing in this or that sense the complete development of the superior organs of the nervous system (Lilienfeld 1873; cited in Schmoller 1902: 169, note 81).
Against the self-sufficient individual of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the organicists claimed to bring the support of science to the primacy of the social bond.
Lilienfeld stated this as a simple fact: "The intellectual and moral faculties of man are exclusively the product of social life.
"[13] The organicists believed this should settle the conflict between individual liberty and social solidarity; humans would come to realize their strict dependence on the collective (Barberis 2003: 62).